blacklist

I’m sure you’ve all read about how important it is for your customers to optimize their sites for search engines. But have you realized that, as a Webhost, you too play an important part in getting better search engine rankings for the sites you host? Your customers may be putting in a lot of effort into optimizing their site, but without your help, they wont get the results they expect! Lets take a look how you can effect their rankings.

As always, the more you know about your server, the better. That is one mantra valid all throughout the Web-Hosting business. Once you have this clear, you will understand why we have so many monitoring tools, excelling in their own way. The better they give you information about your server, the better they are. As each monitoring tool gives information as they see important, depending on more than one single tool to monitor your server is not at all a bad idea. On the other hand, the closer you keep track of your server; that too from various angles, will put you in a much better off position. Now lets check what are the situations when you need to be notified.

In my last post I mentioned how setting up a Feedback loop can help you keep track of spam reports for your server. I realized that it helped tackle only a small portion of the problems faced by Webhosts when it comes to email blacklists. So in this post we’ll take a deeper look at what a Blacklist is, how you can use it and you can avoid getting your own IPs on a Blacklist.

What are email Blacklists?

As the name suggests, an email blacklist contains a list of IPs that have been reported to be a source of spam. Most blacklist authorities implement what is called a DNSBL – DNS-based Black List. This is similar to a the normal DNS, only instead of querying to get the IP address of a domain name, we query the DNSBL to see if an IP address is on that list. It returns details as to why the IP address is listed on that Blacklist, usually including a URL that can be visited to get more details.